Conspiracy

Control Switch On is a CIA book that lays conspiracies bare

The following passages may remind you of your favorite CIA book:

I dialed the number he gave me and then nodded in his direction.
“Now state your name and count backwards from ten,” he continued.
I spoke into the mouth piece, “Ira Teller. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”
When I was done counting backwards, Ryan instructed, “Now hang up.”
I placed the receiver in its cradle and handed the phone back to him.
With a smile, he said, “You’re in.”
“I’m in?” I parroted back to him.
“Yes, you’re in,” Ryan’s blue-gray eyes sparkled as he smiled at me.
I’m in…, I thought. But … what had I just done?
My mind searched for answers, but there were none. I had just thumbed the ride of a lifetime, yet all that I had found was a gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach, and it was not from the fortune cookie that I ate.

This is not your average CIA book. Instead of the CIA being an ominous omnipotent power like in many CIA books, Ryan turns the tables and controls the CIA.

On a more serious note, Ryan once told me of a secret mission he undertook that involved taking out a large military installation in a country whose identity was never to be disclosed. He knew that the target country’s air force had studied and knew our flying formations and flying tactics. Intuitively, he instructed his ground crew to mount two of his missiles so that they would shoot out from both sides of his jet rather than shooting forward from the front of the jet. They refused and contacted an air force general who came down to investigate. He countermanded the order until Ryan brazenly told him, “Then, you fly the fucking mission!”

The general—having to deal with this brash, young upstart of a pilot who was sent down by the CIA— relented, and the missiles, engineered with some adaptive hardware, were mounted sideways on the jet. With the fleet of military aircraft airborne, and Ryan’s jet in the lead position, they engaged the enemy employing a strategic triangular formation. This was what the enemy expected. Then, at the last moment, as the enemy jets swooped in to attack, Ryan fired both missiles from each side of the aircraft. This momentarily stunned the enemy and confounded the view on their radar system so that Ryan and his formation were able to get through their defense and destroy the installation.

Still, there were times when I would probe the boundaries, looking for more immediate answers. He would ask me why I needed to know the information, and if I answered that I was just curious, he would tell me, “Curiosity is self serving,” and then add, “Besides you don’t need to know about that.” Once, when I asked him about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his verbatim reply was, “We know who they were and we took care of them.” Obviously, the Warren Commission was not as forthcoming with the truth as they had led us to believe. Ryan’s words implied that Oswald did not work alone. I knew not to ask him about alien beings at Roswell. And, certainly, it would have been impolite to ask how many people he had killed. Even secret agents have rules of etiquette.

“OBVIOSULY READING STORIES IN A CIA BOOK IS NOT THE SAME AS LIVING THE EVENTS. IN REAL LIFE I WOULD MEDITATE NOT SO MUCH TO CHANGE THE OUTCOME OF THE EVENT BUT RATHER TO PROTECT MY MIND FROM THE TERROR OF ITS’ OWN INTERNAL THOUGHTS.” — IRA TELLER